Marissa L Koven

• Master of Arts
• DePaul University

Introduction: A high degree of sleep disturbance is reported among youth with disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBIs). Given that sleep quality impacts a range of pediatric health outcomes including somatic sensations (e.g., pain) and depressive mood occurs relatively frequently among youth with DGBIs, there is a dire need to disentangle the un...

Objectives: Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) is a heritable connective tissue disorder that results in physical symptoms, psychosocial challenges, and functional disability. Children with hEDS and their caregivers face challenges in managing the symptoms and associated impacts of the syndrome. Method: Mixed methods were utilized to allow c...

Objective Daily hassles and physical health complaints are common among undergraduate students, and both are related to negative academic and psychosocial outcomes. However, the extent to which hassles or health complaints persist from day to day is underexplored, and studies examining whether hassles predict health complaints or vice versa, are la...

Pediatric chronic pain is prevalent among children and adolescents and the incidence is rising, resulting in considerable patient and family distress and impairment, as well as significant financial burden to health-care systems. The biopsychosocial framework has emerged as the predominant conceptualization of pediatric chronic pain. This framework...

Statement of Problem: Previous research has found that disclosure of health status may yield different levels of support depending on illness type, with well-known physical health conditions being less stigmatized and more supported compared to less common physical diagnoses or mental health conditions. College students are an important population...

Hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (hEDS), a genetic connective tissue disorder, involves several body systems which makes symptom management and functioning difficult. The aim of this study was to understand pediatric hEDS patients’ symptoms and primary complaints. Additionally, we examined the cumulative impact of symptoms on physical and psychol...

Research in adult populations indicates that several sociodemographic and environmental variables increase risk for pain and poor outcomes. There is little research exploring the impact of household income, health insurance coverage, barriers to health care, neighborhood and school safety, violence experienced, and neighborhood isolation on pediatr...

The goals of the current project were: 1) examine the frequency of chronic illness (CI) disclosure, 2) examine how CI disclosure varies as a function of demographic factors (i.e. sex, illness type, time since diagnosis), and 3) examine how peer disclosure is related to social support.

Mathematics is critical for making sense of the world. Yet, little is known about how people evaluate mathematical explanations. Here, we use an explanatory reasoning task to investigate the intuitive structure of mathematics. We show that people evaluate arithmetic explanations by building mental proofs over the conceptual structure of intuitive a...

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists—such as Einstein—do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we demon...

Like scientists, children must find ways to explain causal systems in the world. The Bayesian approach to cognitive development holds that children evaluate explanations by applying a normative set of statistical learning and hypothesis-testing mechanisms to the evidence they observe. Here, we argue for certain supplements to this approach. In part...